1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a system, method and program product for portlet-based translation of web content. Specifically, the present invention allows portlets to be individually configured for translation of web content therein.
2. Field of the Invention
Web portal pages have become an increasingly popular means of delivering aggregated, personalized content to computer users. Typically, a portal page is rendered and delivered to a viewing user from a portal server. A portal program such as WebSphere Portal Server, which is commercially available from International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y. is loaded on the portal server. The portal program generally obtains and aggregates web content into a portal page. As known in the art, a portal page includes sections or portlets that each contain particular web content formatted according to a user's preferences. For example, a user could establish his/her own portal page that has sections for news, weather, sports, etc. When the portal page is requested, the portal program would obtain the desired web content from the appropriate content providers. Once obtained, the portal content would be aggregated, and then displayed as a portal web page. This portal technology has lead to the explosion of personalized “home” pages for individual web users (e.g., MY.YAHOO.COM).
In obtaining and delivering web content in a portal page, language translation may be desired. For example, the portlets of the page could include web content that is originally in the German language. However, the viewing user may actually be located in the United States and wish to view the web content in the English language. To date, various “machine translation” technologies/programs have been developed for translating web content of a portal page. One such example is WebSphere Translation Server (WTS), which is also commercially available from International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y. To date, translation of web content has been performed on a page-by-page basis. That is, once the web content for the portal page has been aggregated, the portal page as a whole is translated into the desired target language.
Unfortunately, translation of a portal page as a whole poses numerous drawbacks. In one instance, if a portal page includes web content of varying topics, certain terms and/or phrases could have more than one meaning. For example, the term “eagle” has a different meaning in a sports-related article than it would in a nature-related article. However, page-based translation of the web content would likely cause both instances of the term to be translated into the same target language term. Moreover, page-based translation of web content is not even possible when the portal page includes web content in multiple source languages. For example, portlet “A” could have web content in Spanish, while portlet could have web content in French. In such a case, translation of the page is impossible using page-based translation.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a system, method and program product for portlet-based translation of web content. Specifically a need exists for each portlet of a portal page to be individually configurable for translation of the web content therein. To this extent, a need exists for an administrator of the portal page to be able to designate a set of specifications for translating the web content within an individual portlet. A further need exists for the individual portlets to be configured so that the web content therein can be translated automatically based on a setting previously specified by the user or upon viewer initiation wherein the user requests translation through the portlet itself at the moment translation is desired.